CZJ@CU.NIH.GOV (08/09/90)
It is nice to see all of the activity that Dan has generated on the GenBank bboard after months of inactivity. Clearly it is the responsibility of NIH to do all of the things that Dan talked about and unfortunately much more. Despite the generous funds now available to support GenBank and EMBL activities, there will never be enough money to do all of the things that GenBank (or any other database) should do. With paylines hovering in the mid-teens and award rates in the low twenties, it is hard to justify additional funds for databases like GenBank. Dan points to one thing that bears further discussion. There is no question that GenBank received totally inadequate funding during its initial contract period. The result was a considerable lag period in entering sequence data and unannotated entries. Interestingly enough, the turnaround came with discussions about the importance of the human genome project. One very important fallout was the realization of the importance of the sequence data and the databases that stored them. Without such discussions and exposure, I doubt that such funding would have materialized. Another important part of the discussions was the realization that a significant part of the budget had to be put aside for database issues. Although this facet is recognized as important to the Genome project, the arguement could have just as easily been made for any other branch of science. Nonetheless, when times get tight, it becomes increasingly difficult to find funds for resources such as databases as this necessarily mean that outstanding projects are not funded. Jim Cassatt
kristoff@genbank.BIO.NET (David Kristofferson) (08/10/90)
I think that it is time for some calm to be restored to the waters, but I may do it by burning off the remaining gasoline. Just as Dan mentioned that the LANL/IG staffs have been very busy, I believe that this is true for the NIH staff as well. My experience having dealt with staff people at NIH during both BIONET and GenBank is that they do try to do the right thing. Unfortunately none of us are experts in all of these areas, and thus NIH staffers, as well as us, are always privileged to have the opinions of a variety of experts. This advice is sometimes contradictory and ocassionally misinformed due to the simple fact that most "experts" are only expert in one relevant area. Biocomputing issues are definitely interdisciplinary, and one might wonder how many people are used to admitting when they themselves don't know an answer. Experts generally also tend to come from the bigger name schools and thus these organizations have an additional political clout in the resulting decisions. Just as the databank staffers have to serve a variety of different needs; the people at the NIH are undoubtedly put in the position of trying to reconcile various warring factions. This is reality. Given this state of affairs, it should not be surprising that collossal screw-ups can and do occur. Timing of every event that needs to take place in concert is usually off and people are often left scrambling. In the event that we all become saints and everyone starts looking after the good of the community instead of their own personal interests, perhaps this problem will go away and everything will work smoothly. My recollection is that they tried an experiment like that in the Soviet Union and it turned into a dismal failure. If 1989 taught us anything, it should be that this confused battle of various factions for resources may be the best we poor mortals can do. Of course, this is not a justification for gross negligence, but, knowing the people involved in these issues, there is absolutlely no justification for such a charge. The scientific community, despite all of its grousing, owes these people a far bigger debt than they ever will realize, but generally rewards them with more abuse than thanks. So much for philosophy, now for specifics. Dan, I did not miss your point about there not being funding for everyone to develop their own software. It is true that when the databanks announce a change in format, they are not providing anything other than a warning to the software community that the software community must change. One can definitely inquire about how the software community is going to afford this change when grant money is tight. I would point out two items in response: 1) the Genome Office announced in the NIH Guide which I posted about two weeks ago (and which appeared again on the Genome newsgroup today) that software money is now available for the Genome project. That might be one potential avenue. Of course, one can respond that this money was not there when the proposed feature table changes were planned. 2) It appears from Roy Smith's message that there are people with funding available now who would be interested in undertaking this task. This probably was the case when the feature table changes were announced, too, if this discussion had occurred earlier. Note that this information came about ***because of the exchange on this newsgroup!!*** With the benefit of hindsight I would suggest that, in the future, discussions of format changes also take place on the various databank newsgroups so that software developers can get together well in advance and plan for the kind of cooperative efforts indicated in recent messages. Keeping the interested public abreast of developments is very easy in this kind of forum. I would dare say that this whole incident could have been avoided if this approach was taken earlier (not to predict that other snafus will not develop in the future, of course 8-(.) Dan, if this change sent you into a tizzy, just think what will happen if the various Genome committees decide to implement entirely new formats. You can bet your Bazooka bubble gum that this will happen eventually because technology continues to advance and change is inevitable. If only the world were static ... Parmenides, where are you when you are truly needed 8-)!!! Enough; time to get back to work. -- Sincerely, Dave Kristofferson GenBank On-line Service Manager kristoff@genbank.bio.net